Tuesday, 22 June 2010

So I just came early to work today at 22.00 and found the front door to our warehouse ajar. Thinking that perhaps some of our pets had escaped, I became a bit worried and carefully entered our damp dwelling.

Carrying a meat hook (someone forgot to tidy up last night?) I walked down to the cellar and saw that there was a mess at one of the table. There where also strange sounds coming from the cages and I had to use the cattle prod to calm the critters down. I counted them all twice and all stock seemed to be in place, allowing me to take a sigh of relief (we used to be six people in Frictional you know!).

Then I noticed that some of our notes, parchments and scrolls where missing. A thief! I also found a match lying in the mud on the floor, confirming that (most likely) one of the many hobos had sneaked in. This kind of confused me though, since I thought they learned their lesson last time in a quite tentacular way. It was also strange that they would take papers; I was not aware that they could read (perhaps nature called?).

Oh well. Now it is back to work, have some stuff to disect and refine. Just wanted you all to know abut this shady business in case you hear something!

Sunday, 20 June 2010

This week we reached something that, not too long ago, was a merely distant dream:

Amnesia: The Dark Descent is in BETA

This means that the all needed assets are completed and that it is possible to play the game from start to finish. What is left now is just a bit of polish and minor additions. This does not mean that all is good and we can just relax though. The game is still rough around the edges at places and require quite a bit of work. However, we no longer have to worry about getting new things into the game. Now we can just focus on what is already there and make it as nice as we can.

It is quite astounding how far the game has gotten. We started out making the first proper content around two years ago, and since then the amount assets have just continued to grow. Looking through our project files I counted a total of:106 Music files1202 Model files1533 Texture files856 Sound filesThis was just a very rough calculation though so I have surely missed a few. Also, there is still stuff left to add, so we are not done just yet!

It is also worth noting that this does not mean that a demo will be out shortly. For that you have to wait a few more months I'm afraid. However, we have sent out previews to a few places and some first impressions have started to drop in:

IGN thought that "Amnesia could be the scariest survival horror game in quite a long time".

Gamer fill confessed that"I had to (yes, had to) turn Amnesia off after a short hour of play, so as to give my nerves a rest".

TGDB said"Het spel zou best wel eens één van de engste survival horror games in tijden kunnen zijn". Which I am not sure exactly what it means, but according to babel fish it was quite positive!

To hear things like this from an early preview (consisting of around the first 1/3 of the game) is extremely motivating and makes us very happy. Now we just need to make sure the full game delivers as well! More previews should pop up now that E3 is over, and be advised that they might contain spoilers.

Thanks to all who have supported us so far! We are very close* to a finished game now!